By Rob Smith: Former WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (38-2, 33 KO’s) showed last Saturday night that he’s capable of beating a 3rd tier super middleweight that had only fought once in the past six year in Aaron Jaco (15-3, 5 KO’s) by a 2nd round TKO, but Pavlik isn’t in the same league as the better fighters in the super middleweight division and he’s going to have to be kept away from them by his promoter Bob Arum is Pavlik wants to find success at super middleweight.
Ideally, Pavlik needs to move back down to 160 to try and compete at middleweight to see if he can pick up one of the titles the easy way. None of them current middleweight champions are all that good and Pavlik can probably beat them all on the same night if it were possible to line them outside of a ring. However, Pavlik has problems getting down to 160, so it looks like he’s stuck at super middleweight for a while until he outgrows that division as well.
There are a number of fighters that Arum needs to keep Pavlik away from on a permanent basis because they’re simply too good for him. Here are the guys: Carl Froch, Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell, Anthony Dirrell, Lucian Bute and Adonis Stevenson.
Here are fighters that Arum should also consider keeping Pavlik away from because they’re probably too good for him as well: Robert Stieglitz, Edwin Rodriguez and George Groves.
Pavlik has problems against fighters with boxing ability and power, and I don’t expect that to change any with Arum matching him against especially weak opposition to try and build him back up.
Pavlik is expected back in the ring on June 8th on ESPN2 against an opponent to be named later. It’ll probably be someone as weak as Jaco, because Arum isn’t going to risk Pavlik getting beaten by someone good.